With summer just days away, North Sydney residents will again be spending the season without their public pool.

North Sydney Olympic Pool is expected to reopen in early 2026, having closed in February 2021 with plans to reopen by November 2022.

The refurbishment of the pool, and the financial woes its $122 million price tag has brought for North Sydney Council and its ratepayers, is an extreme but illustrative example of a looming crisis.

As Julie Power writes in today’s Sun-Herald, Australia’s ageing aquatic centres are becoming an expensive problem for local councils.

Canterbury Leisure and Aquatic Centre was due to be demolished in 2022 and reopen in 2024 for a $45 million renovation. Instead, it closed last year and is expected to reopen sometime next year, with a new expected cost of $70 million.

It’s a situation Parramatta Council is trying to avoid at Epping, where the public pool closed in April 2024. The previous month, it began a tendering process to find a contractor for the upgrade.

Unfortunately, as the council writes on its website, it soon discovered “it’s not feasible to deliver the approved development or reopen the pool without substantial additional investment beyond the current project budget”.

Today’s story notes that the average 25-metre pool with change sheds costs $10 million, a price Royal Life Saving Australia believes is beyond the reach of a third of local governments, especially those in less affluent areas where high population growth means new facilities are needed most. The organisation has previously raised concerns about swimming skills in both children – half of children leave primary school unable to swim 50 metres – and adults, noting that a lack of public pools stifles access to lessons.

In places fortunate enough to have a public pool, many existing facilities – built during the middle of last century – are reaching the end of their lives. In addition to the pools mentioned above, facilities at Leichhardt and Willoughby will be closed all summer, as refurbishments take place.

The closure of facilities comes as the latest National Drowning report, published in August, shows 357 people fatally drowned in Australia in 2024-25, a 27 per cent increase on the 10-year average and up from 323 last year.

The report found that drowning deaths in Australia were twice as high among people living in the most disadvantaged areas as those living in the richest.

When it comes to refurbishing Sydney’s old pools, it is clear that local councils cannot afford to foot the bill. Under the status quo, more councils will choose to keep unsafe pools shut, as Parramatta has done at Epping, and those with burgeoning populations in need of swimming skills will struggle to fund new facilities.

The lower-cost, prefabricated pool designs and models for funding reform put forward by Royal Life Saving NSW are sensible solutions to a concerning problem. The state government should consider them.

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